


to make the saints attend them long

by paperiuni



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Angst and Romance, Bittersweet, Canon-Typical Violence, Heavily Implied Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-27 12:38:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20046169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: Shadowhunters don't die in their beds. Neither do many warlocks.Alec and Magnus go on one last mission.





	to make the saints attend them long

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Italiano available: [PERCHE’ IL CIELO LI HA ATTESI A LUNGO](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20202190) by [kate_kate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kate_kate/pseuds/kate_kate)

> _Look_, I don't know either. Sometimes (often) stories come to you and gnaw on your leg until you write them. This wanted out, so I wrote it, and now I'm going back to the WIP so we can have a lighthouse fic update at some point soon.
> 
> MIND THE TAGS on this one.
> 
> tumblr @[poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/)  
twitter @[juneofthepen](https://twitter.com/juneofthepen)  
If you want to tweet at me, my fic hashtag is #junefic

*

When Alec falls, Magnus doesn't sense it.

His hands are full of the demon they've cornered in Prospect Park. Its many bending arms have bruised his ribs and the fangs of its multiple mouths raked his arm. Worse, it's a magic-eater: it's consumed eight Seelies and four warlocks in the last week, and this is why he and Alec volunteered to join the hunt tonight. _ Almost makes me feel young again, _Alec joked as he got off the phone with Izzy.

Magnus ran his hands through the spreading gray and wayward black of his hair, and said, _ Take it easy, Mr. Lightwood. Don't forget your knees. _

_My knees are fine_, Alec said, and then Magnus had to push him out the door to stop the practical demonstration of just how well his knees still fared.

He should not have. He should have let Alec keep him there, safe inside their door, wrapped up in each other.

But he's out in the autumn cold, his back to a tree, his breaths raw with the effort of so much combat magic. The two young Shadowhunters Izzy sent to reinforce their patrol fought bravely and were torn down by the demon. When Coldwell died, Magnus changed tactics. He is what the creature wants: his magic, his power.

He threw himself into the open, so Alec could sink arrow after rune-charged arrow into the scaly mass of the monster. Chunks of it litter the lawn, slow to dissipate. It drags itself closer, and Magnus knows his shield spell will only block one strike. A glancing blow is enough to shatter active magic like a hammer to fine china.

Alec is a shadow on the roof of the utility shed to his right, at the edge of the lawn. The wind scratches through the trees. Too late, Magnus understands that its hum masks another sound.

The blown-off pieces of the demon have crawled back together, knitting like wet clay, forming a second body, an amorphous horror flat in the grass. He sees it slither toward the shed at speed, and right then the main demon crashes through his shield.

The scales that grow in patches on its surface shimmer. They're the part that deflect and absorb his spells. He has to strike the soft places in between—best of all, the maws that gape throughout its form.

He's been preparing. He flings a rough blast at the demon to buy the time he needs as it thrashes, obscene and exultant, under the magic. He weaves the spell, picturing Alec's arrows, swift and unerring in flight. Even now. Magnus has always taken joy in watching him practice: a daily ritual, a comfortable repetition, wherever their lives have taken them.

He shapes his magic the same way. Living lightning, forged into deadly shafts to pierce and burrow deep.

He's a fraction too slow. An inch too deep in the flow of the magic, only aware of his target.

The demon surges into him just as he releases the spell. Its bulk cracks him against the tree, even as the hissing coils of the spell bore through the monster. Stars explode in his eyes and blood in his mouth, but he holds the spell, pours his power into it—twelve dead within days, no, _ fourteen _now, and that's only the ones they know about. The demon must die here. This must end here.

He's always said he doesn't believe in pointless altruism. A calculated sacrifice, though, is another matter.

A thud and a crash, somewhere farther off. Fangs in his flesh, a wheeze in his inhalation that marks a nicked lung. He's not the battle warlock he once was. It's been a quiet few decades.

It's been a _ ludicrously _busy few decades, but he's waged most of those wars over negotiation tables, in clandestine meetings and circuitous favors. In inches of ground won and lost and won again.

The malformed digits squeezing down on his ribs go slack. Somewhere, echoing in his skull, Alec cries out. Sparks rise from the ground in a billowing gust, the remnants of a demon slain by adamas. Magnus slumps to his knees, his body on fire from throat to hip. _ It's dead, it's dead, it's dead. It's over. _Blood wells from between his fingers.

He pulls together a healing spell, presses it to his ribs, and screams with the backlash as the spell crumbles.

A magic-eater. He's covered in its remains. His wounds resist healing. He needs to—Alec.

_ Alec. _

Alec lies silent in the grass, surrounded by the cinders of the demon. Stumbling closer, Magnus leaves bloody footprints himself, but the sight of Alec's wounds raises a sob from his throat. It cuts the strength from his legs like a scythe through wheat, and then he's bent over Alec, hands on his shattered leg—the leg that was fractured once before, that he needs to be careful of, that almost ended his days in the field for good.

"Hey." Alec raises his right hand. It curls around the back of Magnus's neck, trembling. "Did we get it?"

"That's the thing you ask," Magnus whispers. "Where's—where's your stele? You need to—I can't—"

Color flares in his vision. Alec tugs him down and he goes in an untidy heap, his cheek to Alec's uninjured shoulder.

"Broke it." Alec is warm. The ground is wet under them. "Did we get it?"

Magnus laughs so he wouldn't weep. A nearby street lamp casts enough light for him to see Alec's profile, the strong, familiar lines of his nose and mouth. Blood there, too, from a blow to his cheek. "We got it, dear heart. One more time."

"Are you hurt?" A cough breaks the question.

Magnus considers lying. Alec is lucid now, but he has to know that his injuries are terrible, that it's his lifeblood that soaks the grass.

In fact, Magnus should be panicking. He should be tearing every ambient mote of magic out of the air in some desperate last-ditch attempt to save them. He can feel his own heartbeat, hard and erratic, his body laboring against the damage.

This moment has been in his nightmares. Visions of midnight fire messages, of heartbroken calls from Isabelle, of scenarios like this one. Shadowhunters don't die in their beds.

Magnus decided, over forty years ago, that his place was at Alec's side. He's never revisited that decision.

Not many warlocks die in their beds, either.

He's not sure he could get up again.

"Do you remember," he says, "when you came for me in Edom?"

"You thought I'd forget?" Alec has aged with bad grace, and has Magnus's patient daily tending to thank for how little his joints ache, but his bow arm is steady and his mind sharp. He squints at Magnus from under a bruised brow. "Like I was gonna let you get out of marrying me just because—because you ran off to another dimension to save the world."

His fingers clench on Magnus's shoulder. Somewhere across the city, an Institute tracker is going to seize upon his flickering life sign any moment now. Or not. Much has changed in the Shadow World, but demons remain. The hunters for this one had to spread wide throughout the city. The one person who'd _ know _Alec's state is gone, on mission some years ago.

"Talk to _ me _about saving the world, will you," Magnus mumbles.

"I—" Alec draws a rattling breath. "Don't think that's what you wanted to say."

"You came for me," Magnus says, the words wet, "and I knew I wanted every hour I could get with you."

"You _ are _ hurt." Not a question. Alec shudders with the effort to focus. He's slipping, Magnus can feel it, how it strains his body to _ stay. _ "Magnus."

It's not, precisely, an admonition. They were always a gamble. The love they've shared has still changed the world. New York is a beacon of progress in the Shadow World, a challenge to the rest. They've gathered a family around them that sprawls far beyond the city but always calls it home.

Magnus has watched wrinkles gather around Alec's eyes and his easy agility turn to slow, deliberate precision. They've scandalized people more than once with the apparent difference in their ages, and laughed heartily about it later. They've seen nieces and nephews be born and grow up with dizzying quickness, and nurtured young Downworlders and nephilim alike to do and be better.

They've taken in the world in all its wonder. Loved each other fully and stubbornly. Taking time for themselves wasn't always a success, but they got better at it. Magnus hopes it was enough.

"We got it," he rasps. His vision dims at the edges, even with his warlock mark bared. "Our city's safe. Our people are safe."

Alec's next breath is a near sob, wracking his chest, but his voice holds. "No regrets?"

Magnus raises himself up to kiss him. Salt and copper, and the heartbreaking warmth of Alec's mouth. His world in his arms, in this brief moment they have left.

"Not a one."

"Good," Alec whispers, and it is enough.

It was always enough.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Title with a minor modification from 'An Anatomy of the World' by John Donne.


End file.
